It’s Thursday, so another of my mean-spirited, rage-fueled columns has appeared in the Deseret News:   “‘Joseph Smith, American Prophet’ shares story of Restoration, to air on PBS”   ***   If you’re in the area(s), you might find this of interest:   “BYU Creates a Full-Sized Tabernacle of Moses You Can Tour”   ***   Here’s some additional fodder for your already bulging Christopher Hitchens Memorial “Religion Poisons Everything” file:   “Latter-day Saints Provide Famine Relief in Africa,... Read more

    The Church has created a one-minute animated video suitable for sharing on social media.  Check it out:   “What is the Book of Mormon?”   ***   Three private Latter-day Saints have created a two-minute “trailer” advertising this coming weekend’s General Conference.  It won’t be to all tastes.  Some really like it and some really don’t:   “Watch: Mormon Creates Epic General Conference Trailer That Shows Just How Awesome It Truly Is”   ***   For something a... Read more

    Still plinking away on various chapters of the manuscript:   The records that the Hebrews had so laboriously created would eventually prove to be of great worth to their descendants, helping them understand their own uniqueness and their special covenant rela­tionship with God.[1] New challenges were arising, and these records became invaluable. In the late fourth century B.C., the land­scape of the Near East was dramatically changed by the invasion of Alexander the Great. Alexander, descendant of a... Read more

    But, first, a pleasant blog entry from a Palestinian Latter-day Saint:   “BYU-I . . . . A great place”   You can read her story here.   Hers is an important Mormon voice and perspective that I very much appreciate.   ***   And this:   My longtime friend Scott Gordon, president of FairMormon, performs a thought experiment:   “What if People with Red Hair Were Denied the Priesthood?”   ***   Moreover, you might enjoy this little item:... Read more

    It was not only in the divinely revealed ordinances of the temple that frankincense played a central role. Incense was an important part of the worship of other deities as well,[1] and it had other functions besides worship in the strictest sense. In Israel, incense helped to purify from the plague, and it may have been thought to have a sanitary influence in places of slaughter and sacrifice.[2] Certainly its aroma must have been preferable to the smell... Read more

      Stephen Smoot, who (perhaps as an excuse to come in from the perpetually bone-chilling cold outside) is pursuing graduate studies in Egyptology at the University of Nome, Alaska, the University of Toronto, offers an early take on Dr. John Gee’s forthcoming volume An Introduction to the Book of Abraham:   “Book Review: An Introduction to the Book of Abraham”   I was pleased, by the way, to have Dr. Gee drop by this afternoon at the conclusion of my... Read more

    A bit more from Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016):   “Consider gravity.  Newton described gravity with his famous ‘inverse square’ law:  any two masses attract each other, with a force that decreases with the square of the distance.  Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is a more accurate and more difficult improvement on Newton’s theory.  In both theories, a quantity known as Newton’s gravitational constant appears,... Read more

    First, an article in the Deseret News about the new Lee Groberg/Mark Goodman film:   “Old Joseph Smith PBS documentary remade into new docudrama depicting ‘American Prophet’s’ polarizing life”   ***   I’m in a reminiscing vein, so I thought that I might tell about another early experience with Hugh Nibley.   I started off at BYU as a mathematics major.  But I soon realized that, while I admired mathematicians and mathematics, this wasn’t my particular strength and it wasn’t... Read more